PETROLEUM: The Barco

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In A. D. 1907 General Virgilio Barco of the Republic of Colombia turned up in Manhattan. He had in his back pocket an oil lease to 1,200,000 acres of his native jungle—a gift to him from a grateful country. No fool, he went straight to No. 26 Broadway, office of the late John D. Rockefeller. Standard Oil's guards took one look at the general's Latin getup. He never got in, and until last week no oil ever came out of the Barco concession.

For 29 years the concession was juggled like a hot potato. Virgilio sold it to seasoned Promoter Carl Kendrick MacFadden's Carib Syndicate (25%) and Henry L. Doherty's Cities Service Co. (75%). Cities Service faced 250 miles of steaming, mountainous jungle between the Barco and the Caribbean, and gave up. In 1926 it finally sold the concession to the late Andrew W. Mellon's Gulf Oil Corp. Then the Colombian Government put its oar in, canceled the whole concession.

Out of Colombian courts and politics five years later came the Barco concession revamped: Gulf Oil received a 50-year contract calling for construction of a pipe line to tidewater and payment of a 3½% royalty to General Barco's successors, 6% to Colombia on all oil delivered there. Gulf sank twelve wells, and a lot of money. There was oil there, but the cost of getting it out was appalling. In 1936 not one barrel of Barco oil had yet reached the sea when testy, ribald, Norwegian-born Torkild ("Cap") Rieber, The Texas Corp. chairman, finally shelled out a cool $12,500,000 for Gulf's "white elephant." He took Socony-Vacuum Oil Co., Inc. into a 50-50 partnership and for $2,050,000 bought Carib's minority interest. That done, Cap Rieber settled down to one of the toughest engineering feats in the history of his industry: piping oil from the Barco to the sea.

Last week Barco oil oozed from the end of a 263-mile pipe line at the new-built Colombian port of Covenas. It was not black like much U. S. oil but bright green (it looked golden in the sun). Hove to in Covenas harbor, the Texaco tanker Nueza Granada and Socony-Vacuum tanker Altair began to fill their cargo tanks with the first Barco oil for transport to an unnamed foreign crude buyer.

To hardheaded, steel-willed Torkild Rieber (57), once a tanker captain himself, the tough job's end was a triumph. Construction began in February 1938. There were no roads, and the rainfall was terrific. With a fleet of six trimotored Fords, a Lockheed and two Stinsons, engineers flew in, piece by piece, tractors to cut jungle roads, suspension bridges to span the rivers, power plants, refrigeration plants, pumping stations, cement, concrete mixers, food, and 263 miles of twelve-inch steel pipe. In all, 11,000,000 lbs. of freight went into the jungle by air. One plane with its crew of two flew into the jungle and disappeared for good. Eight other men died on the job—transfixed by arrows of the Motilone Indians (a short, husky, irascible tribe who dress in rancid alligator grease to keep off mosquitoes and hang their dead from the ceiling to rot).